What is the point in displaying a poster for a video in the first place? If it didn't present any meaningful information on its own, it wouldn't exist--we'd just have a blank space there with a play button. The fact that the poster provides helpful cues to sighted users as to whether or not they want to play the video (or more to the point, that it _exists_ to provide those cues) is evidence that it can, if properly specified, provide similarly meaningful cues to users of other modalities.
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-----Original Message-----
From: public-html-a11y-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-a11y-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of David Singer
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 9:04 AM
To: Gregory J. Rosmaita
Cc: HTML Accessibility Task Force; Maciej Stachowiak; Ian Hickson
Subject: Re: Video Poster image
I respectfully disagree.
I'm sorry, perhaps the word 'poster' is misleading. In the HTML case, it is not an advertisement for a resource which is 'miles away', as a movie poster is (it's on a billboard, the movie is in a cinema), it's a proxy for the video before it's played in the same place. I think it conceptually wrong to have alternatives for proxies -- the proxy and the alternative are peers.
On Dec 8, 2010, at 10:46 , Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:
> aloha, david!
>
> the video is the video itself, full stop... the poster image is akin
> to either a conventional movie poster (with the names of actors, other
> credits, copyright info, and running time -- the two are NOT the same,
> just like the DVD/Bluray disc you put into a player is the "video"
> portion of the equation, the packaging usually contains a version of the
> film's original release poster with added information which most
> probably will NOT be included in a single frame, which may be the
> "title card" for the movie, the first frame of the opening credits,
> or simply a black frame containing nothing that can be consumed by
> anyone...
>
> thus, video and poster are VASTLY different concepts, and while i
> agree that the 3 points you highlighted need to be urgently
> addressed, so too does the video and poster issue -- a single
> frame of a video may be completely meaningless to those who cannot
> visually process it, making the information contained in the poster
> essential -- especially if it indicates that audio description,
> closed captioning, and multiple language tracks are available
>
> gregory.
> ----------------------------------------------------
> The optimist thinks that this is the best of all
> possible worlds; the pessimist knows it is.
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Gregory J. Rosmaita: gregory@linux-foundation.org
> Vice-Chair & Webmaster, Open Accessibility Workgroup
> http://a11y.org/http://a11y.org/specs/
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
> ---------- Original Message -----------
> From: David Singer <singer@apple.com>
> To: HTML Accessibility Task Force <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
> Cc: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
> Sent: Wed, 8 Dec 2010 09:27:52 -0600
> Subject: Re: Video Poster image (was RE: DRAFT analysis of fallback
> mechanisms for embedded content ACTION-66)
>
>> I agree, a poster IS the video. we should not encourage bad
>> practices by pretending/allowing otherwise.
>>
>> I have three questions about annotating audio/video resources:
>> can I
>> (a) provide a short "alt" text? for video
>> (b) provide a long description?
>> (c) link to a transcript?
>>
>> These seem to be more important, to me, than worrying about
>> whether the poster is semantically different from the video.
>>
>> David Singer
>> Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.
> ------- End of Original Message -------
>
David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.